5 Best Tuesday Columns

William McGurn on a Model of Tolerance for the Ground Zero Mosque While many critics of the proposed Ground Zero mosque cloak their arguments
in patriotic rhetoric, The Wall Street Journal columnist
takes a more restrained approach to the controversy. He recalls a time,
just after the atrocities in Auschwitz in World War II, when Catholic
nuns moved into an abandoned building near the former death camp. He
writes: "As with the dispute over the mosque near Ground Zero, the
convent's presence escalated into a clash not only between different
faiths but between competing historical narratives." Eventually the Pope
withdrew the Catholic nuns in order to be sensitive to the wishes of
the Jews, even though he saw little wrong in the nuns who were praying
for the souls of the departed.

Eugene Robinson on the
Frustrating Afghanistan War Mounting skepticism among liberals for the
war effort Afghanistan has led The Washington Post columnist to lash out
at the Obama administration for using incoherent and circular arguments
to maintain the massive troop presence in the nation. While Americans
are relentlessly promised that they will see soon see a withdrawal, the
time line is ever-shifting and the actual number of troops leaving
promises to be small. He concludes: "But by all accounts, this effort
has been showing few dividends. The more successful tactic has been the
targeted assassination, often using drones, of Taliban leaders -- which
is consistent with a counterterrorism strategy, not with our stated
policy of counterinsurgency."

Mona Charen on President Obama's
Race Overreaction The National Review columnist confesses that she's starting
to worry about this president. Specifically, on whether or not
America's first black president is being "fair to African-Americans."
She cites Obama's tepid endorsement of Charlie Rangel last week and the
whole Shirley Sherrod fiasco as emblematic of the ways some blacks are
treated by the Obama administration. And then there was the ouster of
green jobs czar Van Jones, who, along with New York Governor David
Patterson, deserved to be "kicked to the curb." The key difference,
Charen writes, is that Sherrod (and possibly Rangel) did not deserve the treatment, yet were lambasted anyway. "[I]n any case," she writes, "it’s beginning to seem that
President Obama has a hair trigger where African Americans are
concerned."

Bret Stephens on the Worth of Afghanistan Is
Afghanistan worth it? It's a simple question posed in the Wall Street
Journal writer's latest column, but one with no easy answers. "On the
whole," he writes, "in the scale of American military sacrifice,
Afghanistan does not figure large." It is not another Great War, but a
contained one. What's needed is an adjustment of
expectations for what victory actually looks like. "The measure of
success in Afghanistan isn't whether we create a new Switzerland, but
whether we avoid another South Vietnam."

Anne Applebaum on
Historical Amnesia The Washington Post columnist examines a curious disorder
striking members of the GOP: an inability to remember, in the age of Obama, the budget
excesses of Republican politicians. Remember, she
says "the federal government expanded under George W. Bush's
administration at a rate that was, at least until President Obama came
along, unprecedented in American history." Then there were the pork
projects of former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, from which he "won many,
many imitators." Applebaum isn't out to justify or excuse the big
spending increases presided over by this administration and this
Congress--she just wants some context.